A Smart Grid is a modernized electrical grid that uses analogue or digital information and communications technology to gather and act on information, such as information about the behaviors of suppliers, consumers, and equipment in the generation, transmission, and distribution networks, in an automated fashion to improve the efficiency, reliability, economics, and sustainability of the production and distribution of electricity. As the grid and its operations become more automated, there is greater dependence on a secure and reliable network to support real-time communications between backend control systems and field nodes and among field nodes. Monitoring the state and health of the network and its components are essential. Monitoring SmartGrid networks presents new challenges that are not present when monitoring more traditional networks.
Smart Grid networks cannot be monitored using existing enterprise network monitoring solutions because field networks use a widely distributed wireless network, a combination of non-standard and energy-specific protocols, and new forms of networking technology not supported in enterprise or carrier environments. For instance, enterprise solutions designed to monitor Internet protocol (IP) traffic cannot process the proprietary packets transmitted over the air in the field. They do not understand the mesh networking technology that enables packet relaying, the unique and asymmetric routing protocols, the peer-to-peer transport mechanisms and the broadcast technologies used in today's Advanced Meter Infrastructure (AMI) networks. Wireless FANs further contain a large number of radio channels with concurrent communications, where nodes hop in both frequency and time, making it difficult for traditional systems to track the full communications of a node. Whereas traditional enterprise monitoring systems are located at a central point in the infrastructure, typically a point between the external internet and the internal network, there is no equivalent point in many Smart Grid field area networks (FANs). Only select traffic, for instance, gets sent back through a central point to management systems. The bulk of the traffic in the FAN is not visible to backend systems. Smart Grid field area networks are also much larger than the largest enterprise networks. A Smart Grid AMI network may contain 5 million nodes, whereas the largest enterprise networks contain one to two orders of magnitude fewer devices.
In addition, the real-time nature of utility control systems requires that any monitoring system does not affect or interfere with the performance of the control network or endpoint, i.e., The monitoring system must be non-intrusive. The process of requesting millions of endpoints to provide status information on a frequent basis and backhauling responses or packet intercepts over the same network which would typically be done in an enterprise environment is not practical as it would create immense traffic congestion on low bit-rate wireless networks and burden the endpoint with additional processing, thereby greatly inhibiting energy operations.
Due to these limitations, utilities that have deployed AMI and Distribution Automation (DA) networks in recent years have almost no visibility into the operation of their wireless mesh networks. A utility's ability to monitor field networks typically stops at access points and collectors, leaving utilities unable to directly monitor wireless field communications among nodes in a field network. At best, current practice relies on limited disjoint information obtained by querying a few individual wireless nodes for network statistics. This practice is not scalable nor does it provide a real-time network view. Nodes cannot be queried continuously in-band because the traffic would create network congestion. Even AMI and DA vendors who offer network management services are not able to directly monitor the mesh as part of their service.